Film review

 Robert Altman (1984)

The prologue is painstakingly clear:

‘This work is a fictional meditation concerning the character of and events in the history of Richard M Nixon, who is impersonated in this film.  The dramatist’s imagination has created some fictional events in an effort to illuminate the character of President Nixon.  This work is not a work of history or a historical recreation.  It is a work of fiction, using as a fictional character a real person, President Richard M Nixon – in an attempt to understand.’

Secret Honor, a one-man show, was originally a theatre piece, first produced at the Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre.  It was written by Donald Freed and Arnold M Stone, who share the screenplay credit, and performed by Philip Baker Hall, who recreates his Richard Milhous Nixon in Altman’s film.   This is Nixon a few years after his resignation as President.  His monologue is delivered in his study (somewhere in New Jersey, according to Wikipedia), which nevertheless gives the impression that its occupant – in his own and in the popular mind – is condemned to remain in the Oval Office.  The walls are hung with portraits of presidential predecessors, including Eisenhower and Kennedy, and of Henry Kissinger, against whom Nixon inveighs especially bitterly.  Altman cuts repeatedly to CCTV screens in the room that multiply images of the man alone in it, evoking the paranoia and increasing isolation of Nixon’s time as President.  The tape-recorder he intermittently uses does the same, bringing to mind the Watergate tapes specifically.

Nixon enters the study wearing a suit and tie.  He immediately replaces the suit jacket with a maroon velvet smoking jacket, which stays on until the last few minutes of the film.  The natty, verging-on-rakish look of the garment is unexpected but there are few other surprises to follow.  A Monthly Film Bulletin (January 1985) interview with Richard Combs (used as the BFI handout for their screening of the film) includes the following from Altman:

‘I think that the piece talks about the White House, the job, rather than the facts of history … If this were just about Nixon, I don’t think it would be anything. … When I first saw the play of Secret Honor, I kept thinking about Kennedy, who was the big hero of all the people who didn’t like Nixon.  But I tried to think of how often Kennedy sat in his room, knowing that there were certain things inside his brain which he couldn’t tell another living soul. …’

I honestly don’t understand how Altman could think the Nixon of Secret Honor somehow representative of latter-day Presidents.  Presenting him as such only a decade after he left office was bound to be a tall order, given his public image and the unprecedented nature of his departure from the White House.  The scripts refer to specific events in a specific political career (most of them familiar even to this moderately informed British viewer – Checkers the dog, and so on).  It’s true the film’s Nixon eventually claims to have been a political pawn until ‘secret honor’ drove him to resist the orders of the network controlling him.  He insists his masters pressured him to prolong the Vietnam War to protect their commercial interests in the heroin trade in Asia; his conscience wouldn’t allow him to do this; he therefore staged Watergate as a route out of office.  But the claim is so bizarrely incredible – and the rancorous self-justification with which it’s expressed so typically Nixon (according to popular ideas of who he was) – that it can’t possibly serve to illustrate the lack of free agency of American Presidents more generally.

In her positive review of Secret Honor, Pauline Kael remarked ‘an acting feat by a man who probably isn’t a great actor … Hall draws on his lack of a star presence and on an actor’s fears of his own mediocrity in a way that seems to parallel Nixon’s feelings …’   An interesting idea but I didn’t find the result transcendent as Kael did.  Philip Baker Hall’s performance is a feat but it’s very repetitive.  He keeps working up a head of vitriolic steam until a burst of bitter laughter interrupts it and leads him to ease off briefly.   Then he starts again.  A solo actor in a live show might do this to compelling effect (as well as in order to earn himself necessary breathing spaces).  It doesn’t withstand the camera’s scrutiny so well.

Armed with a pistol (which he doesn’t use) and a bottle of Chivas Regal (which he uses a lot), Nixon lurches between addressing – among others – the judge in an imaginary court of public opinion, an aide called Roberto who’ll transcribe and edit the tape being made, and his late mother.  As he gets drunker, he spits out more and more expletives – aimed at Jews, liberals, the media, ‘East Coast shits’, individual bêtes noires like Eisenhower and Kissinger, and the American electorate.  His last words are ‘Fuck ‘em!’, which he yells over and over until his voice is drowned out by a crowd’s ‘Four more years!’ chant.  The CCTV monitors multiply his malignant valediction before the image on the screens disintegrates into snowstorm.  In the MFB interview Robert Altman notes that ‘Everything in the play comes from things that Nixon has written, or that have written about him’.   Plenty of these things may not have been common knowledge.  Yet Secret Honor, disappointingly, gives you the feeling you’ve heard it all before.

16 June 2021